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And now for something completely different. I don't generally write explanations for these things but this one is a little unusual and wildly AU and so I feel the need to tell you a bit about it before we start. This is fanfic of fanfic. Specifically, it's a prequel to Mizjoely's wonderful Sherlolly WIP, "The Side of the Angels." While it's not necessary to have read that one to understand this one, you should anyway, it's great. Fair warning that it's a lot more explicit than my story will get. This fic was written with her permission but without her editorial hand so any contradictions or inconsistencies are entirely my fault.
The original prompt that inspired Mizjoely was:
an au where angels are terrifying
an au where angels walk the streets and passers-by cower in fear at the sight of them
an au where angels mark scripture into their skin in languages only they can read or even comprehend
an au where angels spill blood daily for the sake of 'divine justice' and human law enforcement are powerless to stop it
an au where angels are the monsters you warn your children about before bed
Let's begin, shall we?
Despair.
That's what he senses, the first time, a wave of bleak despair strong enough that it stands out even over the background noise of Almaty, the bustling capital (for a few more months) of Kazakhstan. He follows it to the epicenter, a dilapidated hotel in Plodik, to find a young inky-haired woman sitting on a bed, with a gun in her lap.
She has finally found a crime she is unwilling to commit. Because of this unwillingness, she has been stabbed, in the thigh, by someone she considered her friend. The pain of this injury seems to throb in time with the Russian speed metal being played in the room to the left, which is failing to drown out the sound of an orgy in the room to the right.
She will be hunted for what she's done tonight. Maybe she is being hunted already. And the gun in her lap seems so… enticing. Socket the barrel into the soft palate of her mouth, finger on the trigger, make a fist. The bullet will tear through the brainstem before she has time to feel it, and her violent and useless life will be over.
He observes all this with a calm detachment, not planning to interfere with her decision. Suicide is a grave sin, though not one within his purview, but even a brief glimpse into her shows a soul so tainted by her previous actions that one more really can't do much damage. This surprises him. She can't be more than twenty-five, too young to accumulate such a weight of sin. So he looks closer.
Motherless. Fatherless. Plucked from an orphanage by a CIA front organization while still a child, trained as a deadly but disposable weapon, sent out into the fallen world to do the dirty work of men who wished to keep their own hands clean.
People like her are his lawful prey. But she's small and pretty and sick at heart, and she never really had a chance, did she? He's got a fair amount of latitude in these decisions, and there's some possibility of redemption, albeit a slight one, for her. So he decides to give her the chance she's never had.
"You're still alive," he says, "And that means you still have choices. You can run, far and fast. Then you can see what you can make of your life."
He's not corporeal at the moment, and so his voice is indistinguishable from her own thoughts. She turns the gun in her hands a few more times. Makes it safe, sets it on the filthy bedspread, and limps to the bathroom to put a towel on her wound. In her mind is a faint flickering of hope.
He murmurs, "Go forth, and sin no more." Then he turns his attention away. Evidently, somewhere in America, someone is suborning children into darkness. He will find them, and when he does he will be delighted to serve as the millstone about their necks.
He thinks of her, a year later, and goes searching. This time he finds her in a refugee camp in Macedonia. There is war in Kosovo, and half a million people so far have been displaced across the border. Her hair is different, now, brown streaked with candy-apple red, the accent English, the name changed (and he wonders if her selection of the name of one of the mothers of God was meaningful), but she is still small and slight and pretty. She's explaining in Albanian to a shattered elderly woman that if she wants to go join her son in Sweden she will have to wait, for an indeterminate length of time, as that country is not currently admitting any further applicants for asylum.
The woman is sobbing, and Mary offers her a tissue, puts an arm around her shoulders. Then she frowns, and cocks her head.
She looks around the office where they are sitting, seeking… him? Seeking something, anyway. But he can't be seen by mortal eyes if he doesn't wish to be, and he does not.
The third time he sees her is purely by accident, since they are on the same battlefield. And he's disappointed at first, because she has returned to her old work, and three men lie dead around her. She cleans the blood off her knives, calmly, and tugs off the mask that covered her pretty face and bright-blue hair.
They are in an abandoned warehouse, and she looks around, paying no further attention to the corpses at her feet, until she finds a locked door. Mary taps on it, and softly calls out, "Girls, are you in there?" in Kituba, the local lingua franca. She receives no answer, but efficiently picks the locks and lets the light from the dead men's lanterns into a dark, dank pit of a room.
There are twenty girls and young women in there, all young, all terrified. She looks like what she is, an interloper in their country, another bit of the detritus of colonialism, but she says "Grandmother Mukonondo sent me. I'm here to bring you home."
And the image of a wise old matriarch who is in fact grandmother (or great-grandmother) to several of them blossoms in their minds, and they relax, and step into the light.
With the assistance of some of the older kidnapping victims, Mary steals a farm truck, fills it with the girls, and drives for ten hours on bad roads, crossing the unreliable border into Uganda. She has far less trouble doing this than she had expected thanks to just a bit of divine assistance. There, in the refugee camp where she was working, she witnesses twenty happy reunions and loses her job, because she has just broken cover quite spectacularly.
Mary accepts getting fired with equanimity. She spends a quiet evening drinking with a document forger in a bar in Kampala and walks away with yet another identity, taking the last name of the barkeeper, but keeping Mary, since she likes it and it pairs well with Morstan.
He can't help but be proud of her.
He's stopped pretending that it's his responsibility to keep following up with her any longer.
He keeps following up with her anyway, and declines to think about why.
Mary's in England, now, going to nursing school, with the idea of joining Medecins Sans Frontieres and shipping back out to the difficult parts of the world once she's finished. She lives off her savings, which are small given that work in human service universally pays badly. But they, and the income from part-time translation gigs, are barely enough to pay the rent for a miniscule bedsit in the bad part of Peckham. Mary walks through this troubled neighborhood with the calm confidence of someone who knows she is extremely unlikely to meet anyone more dangerous than herself.
She leads a quiet life, one of small pleasures. An elderly regular at the homeless shelter where she volunteers, who adores her ever-changing rainbow hair and talks about how she reminds him of his daughter. A local stray cat who she feeds and who therefore vaguely tolerates her, enough to allow her to pet it when it is pleased to be pet. A bookshelf that she finds in a skip and refinishes, over the course of a week, until it is beautiful. A cobalt-blue suncatcher that hangs in her single window and puts spots of color on her face in the mornings. A weekly treat of a cup of coffee rich with cream and hazelnut syrup, bought at the Costa.
She's very lonely, of course. But she's never been any other way and so she's not fully aware of it and it doesn't make her particularly unhappy.
This is something he understands.
It hadn't always been that way for him. There were millenia in which he was entirely occupied with the work of the creation, and then there was war in heaven and he was filled with divine purpose. In those days, he'd had boon companions, friends and family, who had been as close to him as anyone could want.
But now? His sister has retreated into philosophy, and is more remote and melancholy every time they meet. And his friend, who had been closer than any brother…
Ever since the maker had commanded them to act openly in the world, Sherlock has grown eccentric, and to be eccentric either by the standard of angels or by the standard of Sherlock is to be odd indeed. His friend spends his time monitoring the flights of bees and the fall of tobacco ashes, endlessly challenging himself to develop an understanding independent of the universal flow of knowledge granted to all their kind.
Sherlock is learning the world. But while he does that, he has left his friend behind.
He returns to her, again, but this time she's in love.
There is absolutely nothing the matter with David, the man she loves. David is another professional do-gooder, a solicitor who specializes in child protection. He's likely to be a good provider for Mary, he's kind, and he's desperately in love with her.
This should be a proud moment for him, seeing the two of them picnicking in Hampstead Heath. It's a significant accomplishment, after all, to take a desperate sinner and by the application of nothing more than mercy and a handy escape hatch enable her to transform into an official Good Person™. The fact that she is now embarking upon a life of traditional civic virtue where she can produce two-point-five adorable blonde children who she will undoubtedly rear to help heal the world is a sign of his success.
He shouldn't resent the quiet little flame of contentment in her heart.
He shouldn't be envious of any mortal man, even one who gets to drowse in her lap while she sips prosecco from a plastic cup and reads her magazine.
If she ever truly was able to sense him, she doesn't show any sign of it any longer.
There's an element of self flagellation in returning to Mary the next time, but he does, because she's a touchstone in his increasingly isolated existence even though she has no idea he exists. And to his guilty relief, she's alone again. David is gone, and she seems fine with that.
Like many before her, Mary has learned that the downtrodden can be found wherever she goes, and has thus decided against returning to war zones for now. She's instead parlayed her volunteer work at the homeless shelter into a permanent position providing medical care to London's growing population of rough sleepers.
She's bought a place to live, a tiny terraced house at the very far end of the Metropolitan line. It was sold to Mary as a "fixer-upper" suitable for "modernization" though anyone sensible, looking at it, would think that a can full of gasoline and a match might provide the best sort of modernization possible. Mary does not care that it's awful, and is ecstatic at having somewhere, for the first time, that is hers. Her favorite bit is the triangular scrap of garden at the back. Unattended for decades, it is overgrown tangle of trash plants. Previous attempts at clearing it have inspired her to come back, this time with a machete.
Mary has cut her hair very short, bleached it white-blonde. It sets off the fine bones of her shoulders and face as she works in the yard, kneeling to hack at the heavy stalks of weeds. Bees buzz around her, drawn by the smell of her sweat in the hot sun.
Then she stops, lifts up her head, and curls her fingers more tightly on the handle of the machete. She's sensing him, again. It's a mystery.
"Look, I know you're there. Where are you hiding? Come out," she calls, tensing her muscles for an attack.
And for some reason, perhaps because she is still a mystery to him five years in, he does, taking the shape he has worn for millennia. Mary's jaw drops, and for a moment they face one another in the tiny garden, silent but for the hum of the bees.
"Right," Mary says, eventually, "I'd like- I'd like to be standing for this, if you don't mind."
She rises to her feet, leaving the blade on the ground. Her hands are shaking, so she folds them into fists. Lifting her chin, she looks him square in the eyes, and says, "You could have saved a lot of lives if you'd turned up fifteen years ago."
"I am not here to hurt you, Mary," he says, softly, touched by this woman who faces him with such courage, "All sins can be forgiven, and every soul can be redeemed."
Mary exhales all her breath with a shudder, and wraps her arms around herself, sinks back to the ground on weak knees. The shaking of her hands has spread through her entire body. She looks up at him through swimmy eyes and asks, "Did you come to tell me I have to... confess? Because- I can do that. I can do that," she repeats, more firmly the second time.
He should say yes. She's a human and is thus supposed to submit to human justice where such is available to her. But when he thinks of this vivacious, vibrant woman locked in a prison he can't find the heart to say that single syllable.
"Just- keep on with your good work. Redemption is the labor of a lifetime."
"I will!" Mary nods rapidly in agreement, "I promise I will. Thank you, thank you!"
He has never before touched her, but this time he takes a knee next to her. He kisses her forehead and vanishes, leaving her alone in the garden.
Mary's tiny house is in a state of chaos (or construction) the next time he visits, materializing soundlessly in the kitchen. A one-eyed, starveling, and vicious-looking tomcat saunters up to him (cats having no appropriate respect for angels) and starts batting at the white feathers of his wings. He waggles a wingtip, tantalizingly, and the cat rolls onto its back and starts trying to mangle his pinions and that's when Mary kicks open the kitchen door and makes an abortive attempt to knock his brains out with a two-by-four.
She has excellent reflexes, so as soon as she sees that it's him she's able to convert a violent assault into a stumble. The board never gets near his head, not that it could have done him any harm if it had. Then she drops the plank with a clatter, raises her hands in the air, and yelps, "I've been good!"
"I know," he replies. She puts more effort into being good than almost anyone he's ever seen, possibly because it does not come naturally. "Are you always so frightened that someone is going to attack you?"
"Well, just because it hasn't happened yet- I mean, no. Not always," Mary says, lying without even being aware that she's lying. That constant sense of threat hanging over her head must be exhausting, he thinks, with more sympathy than he generally has for a human.
"So what do you want?" she asks curiously.
He does not hesitate. Angels do not hesitate. But he feels foolish and suspicious when he says, "I wanted to see how you were doing."
Mary's theological education was extremely limited and thus she does not recognize precisely how unusual this sort of behavior is. She frowns, and asks, "Are you… my guardian angel?" a concept which for her comes with hazy mental images of little people in white robes sitting on one's shoulders and, for some reason, singing crickets. This sort of imagery has entirely fallen out of the popular culture in the last decade, ever since real angels began to walk the world in their own forms. Nowadays his kind are spoken of in whispers and in somber voices on news reports.
"No, there's no such thing."
"Oh," and Mary continues, confusedly, "Well. I guess I'm… fine? Work's good? Nothing much else is going on? I'm replacing a wall? The plaster's all rotted?"
"Ah. Would you like some help?"
Mary throws her hands in the air in bewildered surrender and says, "Yeah. Sure. Why not? It's not as though I can afford a contractor. Let's get an angel in instead."
Every time he comes back to the tiny house at the end of the Metropolitan line, it is incrementally less terrible. Mary has boundless energy for home renovation, and once she's gotten past the awkwardness of having a celestial being volunteering to help with it makes faster progress than she'd ever hoped.
He's never before spent much time in the company of a human, and despite himself he finds that he admires this tendency of theirs… the way they remake their little corners of the world, without a hundredth of the resources he has, just using brute force and ignorance. The place, over time, comes to represent peace for him- an island of quiet comfort away from his endless, harsh work.
They talk. Carefully, at first, because Mary is quite legitimately afraid of him. But over time she relaxes, and the wry, intelligent and funny woman he'd seen glimpses of for years is back on display. She's curious about him, naturally enough… his continued interest in her is somewhat less usual, but still real. In fact if anything it's gotten stronger now that he actually gets to speak with her.
Over the course of several months, she becomes his friend, a new member of a very small group.
"Do you have a name?" she asks, one day, paint dripping onto her face as she coats the ceiling.
"I have."
She looks down at him from her jerry-rigged scaffolding and asks, "So... what is it?"
"You couldn't pronounce it."
"I bet I could."
"No, you couldn't," he says, with absolute confidence, slapping paint on with vigor. There are species that have the vocal organs necessary to pronounce his name, but humans are not on that list.
"I," she informs him loftily, "Speak twelve languages, six of them well enough to pass for native. I might surprise you. And I can't keep calling you "the angel who comes by my house." So what is it?"
So he tells her his name, and she makes what he has to admit is a very good stab at it, for a human, starting off with "Zhvjawn-" but then dwindling down into something that sounds like she's gargling a cat.
He smiles up at her, and she blushes, prettily.
"To be fair," Mary says, "I'm pretty sure there were windchimes in that."
"The music of the spheres."
"How would you feel about being called John?"
"John is fine."
And John he is, forever after.
When finally it happens it seems as natural and inevitable as sunrise. They are making the garden, and John's stacking bricks to build an elevated flowerbed when he notices Mary staring at his forearms, at the shining scripture that decorates them and the flex of the musculature below.
"Yes?" he asks, and she blinks and replies, "Sorry. Sorry. Nothing. Just woolgathering," but in her mind is a surge of profound desire and the clear thought, "Girl, you are going to hell."
The idea is new to him, but… promising. Even before it was frowned upon he has never gone with a human. There was always that faint hint of bestiality around the idea. But there is nothing bestial about Mary. She's small and slight and pretty and tries so hard to be good, and her mouth is soft and tastes of tea and strawberry jam.
Eventually she pulls back, and murmurs, "I had thought angels were sexless."
So John asks, "Do you want to find out?"